Tuesday, September 16, 2014

The next front of the war? Ebola!

WEARING HIS PRETTIES PURPLE TIE WITH JUST A HINT OF LIP GLOSS, FADED CELEBRITY IN CHIEF BARRY O IS ADDRESSING THE NATION/WORLD AS HE EXPLAINS HE IS DECLARING WAR ON EBOLA AND DUBBING IT A "NATIONAL SECURITY" ISSUE.

BARRY O DENIED THIS WAS A SHIFT IN POSITIONS AND THAT IT REBUKED THE FAMOUS 2002 SPEECH WHERE HE DECLARED, "I'M NOT AGAINST ALL DISEASES JUST THE COMMON COLD."

"THE EBOLA," BARRY O INSISTED, "PROBABLY HAS ITS ROOTS IN THE COMMON COLD."

ASKED BY A SKEPTICAL PRESS TO NAME A DISEASE HE WASN'T AGAINST, BARRY O OFFERED "UH, RESTLESS LEG SYNDROME -- LOOK, I'M NOT GOING TO LIST ALL THE DISEASES I DO SUPPORT, I CONTINUE TO SUPPORT. THE POINT IS, WE KNOW THAT IF WE TAKE THE PROPER STEPS WE CAN SAVE LIVES. YOU WILL SEE. THIS WILL BE JUST ANOTHER SUCCESS STORY -- LIKE LIBYA OR IRAQ."

Yet on Sunday, Falluja General Hospital was bombed and, in addition, Iraqi Spring MC noted the bombings of residential neighborhoods in Falluja also continued with 6 civilians left dead and 22 more injured.

Was al-Abadi lying on Saturday?

Or did the Iraqi military ignored orders given by the prime minister?

If it's the latter, if an order was given and the Iraqi military refused
to follow it, there's no point in any foreign government 'helping' at
this point.

And if the issue is a politician who lied?

That's damaging in its own way. Alice Fordham (Sunday Weekend Edition, NPR -- link is text and audio) spoke
with US Col Derek Harvey about the Sahwa -- mainly Sunni forces who
were instrumental to reducing violence and who were among those targeted
by the recently former Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki:FORDHAM:
Harvey thinks as many as a quarter of them [Sahwa] fought alongside the Islamic
State this year. He says that everything depends on the new government
led by new Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi who will have...HARVEY:
...To work and legitimize local defense forces and empower Sunni-Arab
political leaders of all stripes in these provinces.

FORDHAM:
Abadi's been in power for almost a week now and is making all the right
promises. But political wrangling has stopped the appointment of an
interior or defense minister. And Harvey says this plan won't work until
there's tangible political progress here. Alice Fordham, NPR News,
Baghdad.

And then there's that issue, noted as an aside: The country still has
no Minister of the Interior or Minister of Defense. There were none in
Nouri's second term and the new prime minister has faced resistance and
hostility to his nominees for the post -- resistance and hostility from
Parliament.

This is no time for these positions to be empty.

Barack likes to say the government of Iraq (that the US installed) wants
'our help' but how can you help someone who repeatedly refuses to fill
the posts that would protect their own country?

The press isn't pursuing that question -- or any others -- because they're too busy rushing to support and encourage war.

John Irish and Jason Szep (Reuters) note, "World powers backed military measures on Monday to help defeat Islamic State fighters in Iraq, boosting Washington's efforts to set up a coalition, but made no mention of the tougher diplomatic challenge next door in Syria."

This was the big takeaway from the meet-up in France today. Cassandra Vinograd (NBC News) reports
Francois Hollande, the President of France, presided over a meeting
of various world officials -- including US Secretary of State John
Kerry -- in Paris in which they will supposedly address issues in Iraq.

The only issue for them was the Islamic State and how to combat it with violence. And while they talked, violence continued. Margaret Griffis (Antiwar.com) notes, "Diplomats from 30 countries met
in Paris today to discuss the Islamic State situation in Iraq. The Kurdish
Peshmerga Ministry held
its own meeting with representatives from seven countries. Attacks and battles
left at least 86 dead and 22 wounded."

Any notion that this was going to address real issues quickly vanished
as it became obvious Hollande was not asking for input but being
rhetorical. Answering his own question, he declared, "It is global so
the response must be global... Iraq's fight against the
terrorists is also our fight. We must commit ourselves together -- that
is the purpose of this conference." All Iraq News notes
he insisted the Islamic State is a "threat to world peace." This
despite the fact that, unlike France, the Islamic State has confined its
war actions to Iraq and Syria while France has pretty much spun the
globe.

For years, the world has allowed things to worsen in Iraq until an
Islamic State could be built and fostered. Now they want to 'address'
the product and not the conditions that produced it in the first place.